Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN!
Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2016.

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Thursday, December 3, 2015

First Look at GigaTrees Family Tree Site

A Facebook friend asked me if I had heard of, or contributed to, the GigaTrees.com family tree website. I admitted that I had missed it, and then went to look at it. The site is apparently owned by Tim Forsythe.

1) When I entered the website URL, I saw this screen:

The site says:

"Gigatrees.com was created for all types of users, from family historian newbies to certified genealogist technonerds. Regardless of your flavor, Gigatrees.com will make building your family tree a piece of cake. And when you are ready to take your Genealogy to the next level, you'll find Gigatrees.com provides loads of advanced features not found on other family trees, including support for the Genealogy Proof Standard, Bonkers consistency checking, Census Table Reports, Ancestor Distribution Heatmaps, Generation Lists and much, much more.

It supports both ANSI and UTF-8 encoding so no matter what language your data is in or which application you use, it will be displayed correctly.

It is highly configurable giving you the ability to tailor the content of your tree to your own specific needs, but don't worry, the default configuration was designed to accommodate almost everyone. In fact, unless you are a power user, you won't need to change a thing.

Best of all, Gigatrees.com is completely free. Gigatrees.com relies on the generous support of our satisfied users to cover operating costs."

Reading the text, it appears that you submit your family tree via a GEDCOM file, or add content person-by-person on the site, and then the GigaTrees site examines and analyzes your tree persons. It also creates a set of files that could be uploaded to a website.

Note that the screen above has very few links or menus. In fact, zero, except for the three bars at the top left of the screen on the line with the word "GIGATREES." Clicking on the three bars, revealed a menu on the left side of the screen:

I clicked on the "Upload GEDCOM" button and the GEDCOM file, with over 12,000 persons, started to upload. It took about 8 minutes:

After the GEDCOM upload, I was back to the GigaTrees page. I scrolled down a bit and added a tree name, then checked out all of the Configuration items. Here are the first two screens with the title and configuration details:

After checking all of the Configuration items, I clicked the button at the top of the screen to "Save Config."

That took some minutes to save (as I recall), and then this screen appeared:

At the top of the screen above, with the light yellow background, is the message:

"Almost there. We'll send you an email when your build is complete."

Well, I've not received an email over the last three days, and when I check the site I cannot see any tree data.

There is a sample tree for viewers to look at - see Tim Forsythe's The Forsythe Saga - and explore.

Hopefully, I will be able to display and demonstrate more on this site when my tree has been built by GigaTrees.

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. SeaverPlease comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

4 comments:

I've looked at it in the past, but dislike the lack of transparency of the owners/managers of the company. There is no "About the Company" link that I could find. I can see no good reason to add a tree to this particular company. I can read that you do know the owner/designer but personally, I need to know more, have a sense of why I should 'trust' tree data.

Might just be me on a rainy evening, but I'm shrugging and walking away from this site.

Hey Randy, I just ran across your post. Very sorry to hear the website gave you problems, but very appreciative you went ahead and wrote about Gigatrees anyway. Unfortunately I don't yet have a fix for you. The problem seems to lie with my hosting service. Large trees, those having a lot of individual files create several zip files which are returned by my app server. For some odd reason, my hosting service chokes on concatenating these files together. I have trees much larger than yours that work fine, but when they do fail, they always fail. I've been working on a new framework that will eventually get rid using zip files altogether, but until then, there is not much I can do for those few folks that run into this problem. Smaller files seem to work fine. The good news is that I was able to go into my sever and manually fix these files, as I must do on occasion. Anyway you can access your file and build log now at:

http://gigatrees.com/profile?offline

You'll need to be logged in first. You should be able to run any of the individual tools without a problem I would think.

Your commenters made some good points on transparency. I added an About Us page as well to hopefully alleviate any concerns ... and of course I'm always on for coffee.

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About Me

I am a native San Diegan, a graduate of San Diego State University, a retired aerospace engineer, a genealogist and a family guy.
My wife (Angel Linda) and I have two lovely daughters, and four darling grandchildren. We love to visit them and have them visit us.
Angel Linda and I love to travel to visit friends and relatives, to sightsee, to cruise or to do genealogy. Our travels have taken us all over the USA, to England, Down Under and Scandinavia.
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